How to: Use Third Party Email Aliases With iCloud Mail on iOS/iPadOS
My primary mail account is with Posteo, a privacy-focused provider from Germany. I don’t intend to change that, they’re great and deserve every support!
Also, I’m using Apple’s operating systems almost exclusively and subscribe to iCloud. iCloud and third party mail aren’t a great match, unfortunately.
So for a long time I couldn’t figure out how to use my iCloud account to both receive and send mail through my posteo.de address. On Android using Gmail that wasn’t hard: Forward mail to your Gmail account and register your posteo address as an alias. This alias was then available also in the Gmail app.
It wasn’t that straightforward with iOS’s and iPadOS’s Mail app, but a StackOverflow post helped immensely. Nevertheless, I wanted to document the process of setting it up with pictures and in full length.
Notes:
Forward mail from <mail>@<thirdpartyemailaddress>.<tld> to <mail>@<icloudaddress>.<tld> so you got the “receive third party mail”-part covered. Now, sending is going to be trickier.
Set up the account as other (2) and choose mail account (3) as the account’s type.
Enter your account data including credentials (4). When it comes to the mail server settings (5), choose a dummy for the server handling incoming mail, and your actual mail server for outgoing mail (SMTP). Be sure to pick POP/POP3 as the protocol. The latter is for preventing the mail client to try and fetch server-side settings (e.g. folders) for incoming mail. Then confirm.
It’s going to take a while, then complain about SSL (7). In the popup, do not try to setup the account without SSL, i.e. press No (“Nein”) so you’ll still use SSL and server port 587 to send mails. It’s going to take another while, then present you with an overview (8) which you’ll confirm with Save (“Sichern”). Discard the popup warning you about possible problems with the account (9) by hitting Save (“Sichern”) again.
Pick the third party account (1) and set the fetch schedule to manual (2; “Manuell”). Then make sure manual is also selected for non-push schedules (1). These settings will prevent the mail app from trying to fetch mail from your dummy POP3 server.
Make your third party account the default account for sending mail in the Compose section of Mail’s settings. This is optional, you could still select the account from within the mail editor. I just like to have it already available as the default.
As mentioned before, the biggest caveat to the whole thing: You still need to transfer sent mails from your third party account’s Sent folder to your iCloud’s Sent folder. While I haven’t found a way to automate it through the Shortcuts app, one can still do it manually by just moving the email(s) to the correct folder on iOS/iPadOS through the Mail app’s Move dialog.
For my usage that wasn’t a problem since I barely write any emails these days. Your mileage may vary, of course.